The Spiritual Life and Other Writings

Illegitimate daughter of a duke, abbess, mystic: Camilla Battista da Varano lived a tempestuous life during tempestuous times in Italy, marked by political unrest and the arrival of the Reformation. And not even her withdrawal to a Clarissan convent over her father’s protests could still the dark nights of her soul. Canonized in 2010, Varano left behind a considerable body of writings in both Italian and Latin that is now available in English thanks to historian William Hudon’s meticulous edition and translation. Those writings include poems, prayers, spiritual autobiographies, and her audacious Mental Sufferings of Jesus during His Passion in Gethsemane — so audacious that she strategically claimed that she had simply transcribed the words of another nun. Her rescripting of gender norms, her deep self-awareness, her interest in other women writers: all make of Varano a remarkable figure whose defiance of stereotypes complicates our understanding of early modern spirituality.
-Jane Tylus, Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University

Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524) was a Franciscan nun and the author of profound spiritual writings in both prose and verse. Raised in the princely household of Camerino in north-central Italy, she put her thorough humanist education to use explaining her own spiritual experience and delivering advice to others. Varano composed ecstatic revelations, prayers, poems, hagiography, spiritual direction, and commentary on convent legislation. She drew on a wide variety of sources, including scripture and Church Fathers, plus popular literature and proverbs. Varano was an erudite woman of considerable complexity, defying many of the commonplace images we associate with religious women of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

WILLIAM V. HUDON is Professor of History, emeritus, at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Among his other publications are Theatine Spirituality: Selected Writings (1996), and Marcello Cervini and Ecclesiastical Government in Tridentine Italy (1992).